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AMERICA, 



The Study of Nations: Her Religious Destiny. 



The Columbian Sermon 



DELIVERED IN 



S. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL, BUFFALO, NEW YORK. 



BEFORE THE 



Laymen's Missionary League of the Diocese 
OF Western New York, 



WILLIAM STEVENS PERRY, D.D. (Oxon.), LL.D., D.C.L. 

Bishop of lotva, and Historiographer of the American Church. 



1893. 



AMERICA, 



The Study of Nations: Her Religious Destiny. 



The Columbian Sermon 



DELIVERED IN 



S. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL, BUFFALO, NEW YORK, 



BEFORE THE 



Laymen's Missionary League of the Diocese 
OF Western New York, 



WILLIAM STEVENS PERRY, D.D. {Oxon.), LL.D., D.C.L. 

Bishop of loiva, and Historiographer of the American Church. 



,DAVENPORT, IOWA: 

EDWARD BORCHERDT, PRINTER. 
1893- 

L- 



.13=) 




America, the Study of the Nations: Her Religious Destiny, 



And the Lord said unto Abram, * * Lift up now thine eyes, and look 
from the place where thou now art northward, and southward, and eastward, 
and westward: For all the ]and which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to 
thy seed forever.— Genesis xiii:14, 15. 

Wondering, longing, questioning glances had for centuries 
been turned by the peoples of the Old World towards the illim- 
itable western seas. What lay beyond the vast expanse of 
waters, all unseen, unknown to European eyes? Sailors, direct- 
ing their course towards the sun-setting, had returned from the 
"sea of darkness" baffled, terrified. Geographers had pored 
doubtingly over Strabo's foreshadowing of the existence of 
inhabited lands far to the west of the Pillars of Hercules. 
Scholars had dreamed that here, amidst the glories of the west- 
ern horizon, lay the fabled Atlantis, the vanished island, swal- 
lowed by the sea, of which Plato wrote. Map-makers had stud- 
ded their charts with fabulous countries and phantom isles. The 
returned voyager grew garrulous in his recitals of adventure; 
now among the abodes of demons, and now on the wandering 
San Brandan's Isle; or in Antillia, the ocean site of the seven 
cities and sees founded by the Spanish prelates who sought in 
the West a refuge from the conquering Moors.* Merchants 
questioned with each other if beyond the fogs, the calms, the 
storms, the unknown terrors of the western waters there might 
not lie the shortest path to Cathay, Cipango, and "the land of 
Ind," of which Marco Polo had brought back golden tales. The 
soldier, impatient for other worlds to conquer, longed to prove 
his mettle in these phantom lands where were localized the 
myths and legends of classic fable, with their "gorgons and 
Chimeras dire." The priest, mindful of the Great High Priest 
of his calling, was fired with enthusiasm to bear the standard of 
the cross westward to unknown lands and other continents, and 
to break the Bread of Life among tribes and peoples who had 
never heard of Christ and His salvation All men everywhere 
were impatiently looking and longing for the revelation of the 

* Antillia, the Island of Seven Cities, discovered and settled by an Arch- 
bishop and six Bishops of Spain who fled into the Western Ocean after the 
victory of the Moors in A.D. 714 over Roderick, was reported to have been 
rediscovered in 1447. 



4 THE COLUMBIAN 8EKM0N. 

unknown wonders and glories at the west. There had long been, 
even from classic times, a finger-pointing to this undiscovered 
country. In somewhat vague but lofty verse Seneca, in the 
chorus of his Medea — a work made memorable by its philo- 
sophic author's ethical genius and his tragic end — had placed 
on record what Lord Bacon well styled "a prophecy of the dis- 
covery of America" in these well-known lines: 

Venient amiis saecula seris 
Quihus Oceanus vincula rerum 
Laxet, ei ingens paiebit ielliis 
Tethysque novos detergei orhes 
Nee sit ierris uUima Thule.-f 

The minds of all men were thus alive to the possibilities of 
western discovery. Influences infinite in extent and beneficence 
seemed awaiting the magical word which should remove all bar- 
riers and reveal the surpassing splendors and the marvels beyond 
belief with which imagination had invested the unknown Occi- 
dent. As the centuries passed, hope deepened into certainty, 
speculation gave place to conviction, and the mind of man began 
to grasp the truth, now soon to be assured, that the desire, the 
expectation, the longing of all peoples of the then known world 
was not an illusion. The "sea of darkness" was stripped of its 
terrors. Streakings of light began to illumine the gloom that 
had rested on the western horizon. Already vikings seeking 
new homes had dared to sail westward on the vast expanse of 
waters, and had returned unharmed. In the tenth century of 
our Christian era Greenland had been colonized by the hardy 
and adventuresome Norsemen. In the year of our Lord 1000 
Leif Eriksen, and a little later Thorfinn Karlsefne, had explored 
Vinland, with its wild grapes reaching down into the very sea, 
and its dense forests of oak and pine along the shore.^ Several 
seasons were passed on the North Atlantic coast. Temporary 

t Seneca, Medea, 376-380. " There shall come a time in later ages when 
ocean shall relax his chains and a vast continent appear, and a pilot shall find 
new worlds, and Thule shall be no more earth's bounds." 

X Justin Winsor reminds us that there is no impossibility in the story of 
Prince Madoc having colonized the west in 1170. Leaving behind him over an 
hundred settlers on his first expedition, he is said to have returned to Wales. 
Setting sail with ten ships he passed out of the view of history forever. " The 
opinion reached by Major in his edition of Columbus' Letters (London, 1847), 
that the Welsh discovery was quite possible, while it was by no means prob- 
able, is with little doubt the view most generally accepted to-day." — Winsor, 
Nar. and Crit. Hist, I, 111. 



THE COLUMBIAN SERMON, 

homes were reared ; and many a child besides Snorre, from whom 
Scandinavian ecclesiastics, students, statesmen, artists, and mag- 
istrates trace their descent with pride to-day, was born, possibly 
on the shores of Massachusetts Bay, certainly between Point 
Judith and Cape Breton. Prince Madoc, if we may believe the 
bardic songs of Wales, led to the far-distant west numbers of his 
countrymen, traces of whose coming to this then unknown world 
are found in still-existing legends hard to be disproved.;]: The 
classic apothegm that there were many heroes before Agamem- 
non, may be changed to read that there were many pre-Colum- 
bian discoverers of America; and of these unremembered and 
unchronicled explorers it may be truly said that they at least 
saw the North American continent, which the eyes of Columbus 
never looked upon. Humboldt was not willing to deny the early 
and repeated visits of the Basques to the North Atlantic fishing- 
grounds,§ and Harrisse j| claims that the Basques and Northmen 
frequented the American shores as early as the seventh century. 
The Basques, the Normans, the Welsh, the Irish, and the Scan- 
dinavians, not to speak of the Asiatics, have each " claimed a 
share in the gift of a new world to the old." These daring 
explorers and adventurers were led westward by the love of 
excitement; were seeking new homes; were striving to open new 
avenues for traffic; were fleeing from ills and dangers existing 
in their old-world abodes. Among so many seekers is it possible 
that none should have found the object of their quest? In the 
year 1491, before the Santa Maria, the Nina, and the Pinta 
sailed from the port of Palos, the English had begun to send out 
expeditions from Bristol to discover the Islands of the Seven 
Cities.* But it was neither Vinland nor San Brandan's Isle, — 
it was not a new world lying concealed in the west, that formed 
the quest of the Genoese adventurer sailing from Palos in 1492. 
In the words of Professor John Fiske, "Columbus never pro- 
fessed to have discovered America; he died ia the belief that 
what he had done was to reach the eastern shores of Asia by a 
shorter route than the Portuguese. "f Cathay, with its spice and 
gold; Cipango, with its gems and balms; the Orient, and "the 
land of Ind" were what Columbus sought, and what he professed 

§ Humboldt's Cosmos, Eng. ed., II, 142. 

II Harrisse, Notes on Columbus, 85. 

* Vide Winsor's Narrative and Critical History, 1, 75. 

t Fiske, The Discovery of America, I, 390. 



6 THE COLUMBIAN SERMON. 

with many a solemn asseveration to God, to have found. He 
was never undeceived in his belief that Cuba was the Asiatic 
main. He lived and died unaware of the discovery of a new 
world. 

Wonderful was the enthusiasm when the dreaded and forbid- 
ding "sea of darkness" was found to be, not as Columbus sup- 
posed, a nearer approach to the Orient, but the highway to an 
unknown hemisphere. The providence of God had ordered the 
change of the course of the tiny ships bearing Columbus and his 
followers when the continent of North America was well-nigh 
reached. "A day or two further on his westerly way," says 
Humboldt, "and the Gulf Stream would insensibly have borne 
the little fleet up the Atlantic coast of the future United States 
so that the banner of Castile might have been planted at Caroli- 
na." ;|: It was reserved for John Cabot, sailing under the pat- 
ronage of King Henry VII. of England, in the ship Matthew of 
Bristol, to discover, on S. John Baptist's Day, 1497, the conti- 
nent of North America, which Columbus never saw and on which 
his feet never trod. In the counsels of the Almighty it had been 
determined that on this continent, first seen by English eyes, 
and first taken possession of (despite the papal bulls of demark- 
ation and exclusion, giving the Western World to Spain to hold 
as a fief of Rome) by an English discoverer, for England's crown 
and England's Church, there should be the scene of the struggle 
for the mastery between the two civilizations, the two types of 
Catholicity, the two ideas of liberty, the two notions of nation- 
making, the two conceptions of law, the two opposed and con- 
tending races and peoples — Latin as pitted against Anglo-Saxon ; 
and the rival faiths — Roman-Catholicism as opposed to Anglican, 
or the corrupt, imperfect Christianity of the middle and dark 
ages as contrasted with the primitive catholicity seen in the 
Church's first years, and shown to-day in the return to the teach- 
ings and practice of the primitive, apostolic, catholic Church of 
Christ. Here on the American continent was to be the Battle of 
Armageddon. Here the evil influences, the shameful excesses, 
the unholy motives, the base and brutal passions engendered by 
the alliance of a corrupt Christianity with the traditions of a 
dead Roman imperialism — each and all never more baleful or 
more potent than when a Rodrigo Borgia (himself an incarna- 
tion of selfishness, sensuality and sin) filled, as Alexander VI., 

X Quoted by Winsor, Columbus, p. 207. 



THE COLUMBIAN SERMON. 7 

the papal chair, and claimed to be the vicar of Christ — were to 
meet in conflict on American soil with a true catholicity, a prim- 
itive purity, an apostolic Christianity, and to join issue in a 
struggle the end of which is yet to be. 

It is a remarkable fact that the discovery of the North Amer- 
ican continent, which Columbus failed to accomplish, was made 
by Cabot in practical defiance of the wish and will of Pope Alex- 
ander VI., whose bulls of demarkation and exclusion, issued in 
1493, made the Western World a papal donative to Spain to 
possess in subjection to the Church of Rome. The planting of 
the cross on the territory now possessed by the United States by 
Cabot, commissioned by King Henry VII. to do this very act, 
and the formal occupancy of the American mainland in behalf 
of the crown of England by virtue of priority of discovery and 
actual possession, was not the first "protest" of England's throne 
and England's Church — the free, the national Church of En- 
gland recognized and named in Magna Charta — against the 
assumptions of the papacy. § Nor was it the last, for it is due 
to the following-up of Cabot's discovery by English statesmen, 
sailors, soldiers, Churchmen, under the reign of the Tudor Queen 
Elizabeth, and the insistence on the right of England's people 
and England's Church to possess the northern continent, main- 
tained at the cost of English life and treasure, that we, the people 
of the United S/ates, owe nothing to Cohimbus, nothing to Spain, 
nothing to Rome ! The genesis of our nationality; our liberty, 
both civil and religious; our free institutions; our very Chris- 
tianity, are all to be traced not to the Franciscan Convent of 
Santa Maria de la Rabida, not to the port of Palos, not to the 
sighting of San Salvador, not to the Genoese adventurer himself 
whose life was stained by impurity, selfishness, rapacity, false- 
hood, and a fiendish cruelty ; but to the English people and to 
the English Church and Christianity. 

The republics of Mexico and South America represent and 
reproduce the influences and results of the Latin civilization, the 
Spanish institutions, and the Roman Christianity. In the strug- 
gle for the acquisition, the possession, and the mastery of the 

§ One of the most eminent of oui- modern historical students, Justin Wiu- 
sor, the editor of llie Narrative and Critical History of America, in a late 
monograph entitled America Prefigured, calls attention to the fact that En- 
gland, at the period just preceding the voyage of Columbus, "had for a century 
or more insisted on emancipating herself from the papal supervision as to the 
occupancy of new lands; and this same independence," proceeds Mr. Winsor, 
"now sent John Cabot to the discovery of our own shores." 



8 THE COLUMBIAN SEKMON. 

North American continent, dating hack to the clays of Columbus 
and the Cabots, and ending not even with the cession of New 
France to the English at the Peace of Paris in 1762 but still 
maintained in our successive territorial gains of Florida, of the 
"Louisiana purchase," in the acquisition of Texas, New Mexico, 
and California, we, the people of the United States, have emphat- 
ically and unmistakably demonstrated our origin and the influ- 
ences, civil and religious, shaping our history, our progress, and 
our prospective development, and making us what we are as a 
people to-day. Our speech, our laws, our liberty civil and relig- 
ious, our free institutions, our civilization, our Christianity, our 
very forms and features, confirm the statement I have made: that 
we, the people of the United States, owe notJiing to Cohiinbiis, 
nothiug to Spain, nothing to Rome. Ours, instead, are the En- 
glish tongue, the English liberty, the English law, the English 
institutions, and the English reformation-Catholicity. 

The Latin peoples and the Church of Rome were granted by 
Divine Providence full opportunities for planting colonies in this 
western world, and of attempting the conversion of the aborigines 
of America to Christ. The pages of history will tell the result 
of these attempts at nation-making, these efforts at bringing the 
tribes peopling this continent to a knowledge of Christianity. 
The reader of the pages of Prescott and Arthur Helps will recall 
the nature of the Spanish colonization by conquest, and Park- 
man will give the story of the settlement of New France. The 
Christianizing of the natives by the Spaniards, dating back to 
the very days of Columbus himself, was the enslavement and 
extermination of these guileless children of nature; while Park- 
man tells us that the French Jesuit missionaries left the baptized 
savage a savage still. The Latin race sought rather to gratify 
its greed for gold than to colonize commonwealths in the New 
World. The baptism the representatives of Eome administered 
was a baptism of blood. The story of the Spanish and French 
settlements on this continent, in which the Church of Rome has 
from the first been paramount, is one that can only be read with 
tears. We blush for the civilization, and the Christianity even, 
which has thus been exemplified. 

We have been told by no less an authority than the late Chief 
Magistrate of the United States, in his proclamation calling for 
the national observance of the four-hundredth anniversary of the 
discovery of an insignificant West Indian island, that " Colum- 
bus stood in his age as the pioneer of progress and enlighten- 



THE COLUMBIAN SERMON. 9 

ment," and the people were, therefore, desired to give "expres- 
sions of gratitude to Divine Providence for the devout faith of 
the discoverer."* The Corresponding Secretary of The Catholic 
Truih Society of America, in a printed lecture, had earlier 
asserted that "this American continent owes its very discovery to 
the heroic faith of a devoted son of the Catholic Church, whose 
grand object in undertaking the gigantic and perilous work of 
discovering a new continent was to win souls to Christ through 
the spread of the Catholic faith."j- Nothing could be more un- 
critical or unhistorical than words such as these, whether they 
come from President, or lecturer, or are reechoed, as we shall see, 
by the Pope himself. We find in the letters and papers of 
Columbus many rhapsodies about the conversion of the natives 
of the West Indies; but, as one of the latest and most judicial 
of his biographers aptly puts it, "the very first sight he had of 
them prompted him to consign them to the slave mart; just as 
if the first step to Christianize was the step which unmans.";]: 
The letter of His Holiness, Pope Leo XIII., addressed to the 
archbishops and bishops of Spain, Italy, and the two Americas, 
is of like tenor. Speaking of the "man from Liguria" who first 
landed, under the auspices of God, on the trans-Atlantic shores, 
the Pope asserts: "By his work a new world flashed forth from 
the unexplored ocean ; thousands upon thousands of mortals were 
returned to the common society of the human race, led from 
their barbarous life to peacefulness and civilization; and, what 
is of much more importance, recalled from perdition to eternal 
life by the bestowal of the gifts which Jesus Christ brought into 
the world." 

In the same strain a recent Roman Catholic essayist proceeds: 
"The world is, therefore, indebted to the Christian zeal of a 
(Catholic nation, and its noble Queen and her spiritual adviser; 
but more than all to that great man and heroic Catholic, Colum- 
bus himself, for the accomplishment of this great undertaking, 
and the opening up to commerce, civiliz .tion, and Christianity 
of the fairest portion of the earth. "§ 

If the traffic between the simple-hearted children of the 
Antilles — a trade built up from the first and by Columbus 
himself, upon wrong, robbery, cruelty, and murder — and the 

* President Harrison's Proclamation, July 21, 1892. 

fWinsor, Columbus. 

X Markoe's The Catholic Church and the American Republic, p. 3. 

§ Macdonald's The Catholic Pages of American History, p. 7. 



10 THE COLUMBIAN SEEMON. 

licensed agents of the admiral and the insatiate merchants of 
Spain, be commerce ; if the devastation of this fairest portion of 
the earth by the extermination of the guileless natives, following 
their systematic debasement and enslavement to fiends in human 
forms be civilization ; if the whole management of ecclesiastical 
affairs with its inquisitors, and the establishment of the nuio 
da fe in those portions of the New World under the dom- 
ination of Spain, save the brief episcopate of Las Casas, be 
Christianity, we can accept these words of reckless assump- 
tion, uttered with the view of establishing, through Columbus, 
the late realization of Alexander's bull in securing for Rome 
and the Papacy the conversion of the people of the United 
States. Prefacing a recent issue of Cardinal Gibbous' Claims 
of ihe Catholic Church in the Making of the Repuhlic is a map 
which gives the true significance of our Roman Catholic breth- 
ren's interest in the Columbian observance, and their insistence on 
the claims of the Genoese adventurer, to be regarded as the discov- 
erer of America. This cartographic curiosity with its title, "The 
Original Catholic Settlement of the United States," and its le- 
gend, The sign of Chrisfs Cross is over it all, and its added motto, 
""A soil fer I Hi zed by the Blood and Sweat of Catholic Explorers, 
Founders, ayid Missionaries,^' gives to the Latin peoples — Span- 
ish, French, and the "Irish Catholics," as the founders of Maryland 
are styled — the credit for the original settlement of four-fifths 
of the territory of the United States, thus seeking to establish 
through Columbus and his followers the claim of the Church of 
Rome to the very soil comprehended in Alexander's bull. This 
is the view of him who sits in Alexander's seat to-day. The 
"especial reason for which we believe we should commemorate 
in a grateful spirit the immortal event of the discovery of 
America," argues His Holiness, Pope Leo XIII., is this: "It is 
that Columbus is one of us. In effect," proceeds the Pontiff, 
"Columbus discovered America at about the period when a 
great tempest was going to unchain itself against the Church. 
Inasmuch as that it is permitted by the course of events to ap- 
preciate the Divine Providence, it really seems that the man for 
whom Liguria honors herself was destined by a special plan of 
God to compensate Catholicism for the injury which it was going 
to suffer in Europe." 

Well is it for us who claim a pure and primitive catholicity, 
who recognize our origin, who read aright the lessons of our 
history, that the issue is thus fairly, fully made. 



THE COLUMBIAN SERMON. 11 

There has been planted in this Western World the American 
Church — a branch of the Holy Catholic Church of Christ's own 
founding — and this American Catholic Church is a national, 
autonomous Church, independent of alien potentate or power. 
Ours is the primitive faith, the apostolical succession through 
the long line of Catholic bishops in the past, reaching even to 
the Lord Himself, the Chief Shepherd and Bishop of Souls. We 
of the American Church represent the Church of England; the 
Church of Magna Charta; the Church of Augustine of Canter- 
bury ; the Church of Britain, founded, if not by S. Paul in his 
journeyings to the farthest west, at least by followers and con- 
verts of the great apostle to the Gentiles. We of the American 
Church trace our spiritual lineage back to the giving of the 
great commission: "Go ye into all the world;" "Preach the 
gospel;" "Disciple the nations." 

The American Catholic Church is a national Church, and as 
such is independent of foreign rule. It yields no allegiance to 
the so-called Vicar of Christ who sits in a Borgia's seat, and 
would, were it possible to reverse the results of centuries of 
struggle for the mastership of this land of ours, make good, as 
he himself avers, the loss of the Saxon and Scandinavian Chris- 
tianity to Rome at the Reformation period by reducing the Uni- 
ted States to his spiritual rule, making us a mere dependency on 
the will of one whose temporal power his fellow-countrymen — 
those from amongst whom the Popes have been chosen for centu- 
ries: those who could but know the papacy best — threw off with 
singular unanimity, and whose arrogant claims of lording it over 
God's heritage are, perhaps, less recked in Rome than by the 
Ultramontanes of our own land. But the genias of the republic 
is opposed to foreign domination. The so-called Holy Roman 
Church is an exotic here. It makes no claim to independent, 
autonomous existence. It is here, as the primate of all England 
has aptly characterized its state on English soil, " The Italian 
Mission." Even with the advent of a papal ablegate it is noth- 
ing else. Its prelates are powerless, the creatures of the Propa- 
ganda and the Pope. Their consecration oath binds them to 
complete subservience to their "Lord, the Pope." The Papal 
bull creating the See of Baltimore, then comprehending the whole 
United States, binds this creation of Pope and Propaganda irrevoc- 
ably to the rule of Rome — to absolute dependency on the Pope. 
The Roman succession in this land of ours was both intrusive 
and irregular. The excellent Carroll, the first Roman bishop of 



12 THE COLUMBIAN SEKMON. 

Baltimore, was consecrated in variance with the requirements of 
the ancient canons by a titular Bishop of Rama, Dr. Charles Walms- 
ley, a so-called "Vicar apostolic," but destitute of Episcopal juris- 
diction. And this consecration was done in a Romish gentlemen's 
private chapel, by this single bishop, assisted, not by two other 
bishops but by two priests, and this irregularity was expressly 
authorized by the Papal bull providing for this function and 
given over the fisherman's seal. And this intrusive, irregular act 
was done in an English See duly and canonically filled by a Cath- 
olic bishop, having both mission and jurisdiction as a member of 
the episcopate of a national church, founded in apostolic days. 

And all the while there were in the United States not only a 
duly constituted and autonomous branch of the Catholic church, 
but also a college of apostolic bishops — Seabury of Connecticut; 
White of Pennsylvania ; Provoost of New York — consecrated 
agreeably to the ancient canons and universal usage, each by 
three or more bishops occupying sees, and in the line of succes- 
sion from the apostles and the Lord of the apostles Himself. 
The Church thus constituted, thus oflicered, was the historic 
Church of the country, as well as the Church of its English- 
speaking people. It had come to this continent with its first 
discoverer, John Cabot, and it had come in spite of Pope Alex- 
ander's bull. It had accompanied Frobisher in his search for 
the north-west passage, and the services and sacraments of its 
faithful priest, ''Maister Wolf all," on the shores of Hudson's Bay, 
in 1578, were the first religious solemnities of the Church of 
Christ in the ice-fields of the far north. It had been with Drake 
when this daring and relentless foe of Spain and Rome discov- 
ered the Northern California and Oregon coasts, penetrating far 
to the northward, and for six weeks from the eve or feast of S. 
John the Baptist, A.D. 1579, while the " Golden Hind" was re- 
fitting at Drake's Bay, it was the Church of England's services 
and sacraments that Francis Fletcher, priest and preacher of 
Drake's motley crew, celebrated in the sight of sailors and sava- 
ges alike. It was with Raleigh's colonies at Roanoke, where, in 
the ill-fated city of Raleigh, the Church's Matins and Even-song 
marked eacli day's beginning and close, and where, in this first at- 
tempt of the English people at colonization within the territory 
of the United States, the Indian Chieftain, Manteo, was baptized 
with the forms of the book of common prayer, on the Ninth Sun- 
day after Trinity, August 13, 1587, and a week later Virginia 
Dare, the first Christian born in Virginia, was admitted to Holy 
Baptism, by the unnamed priest of the settlement. 



THE COLUMBIAN SERMON. 13 

This Church was with the settlers at Jamestown, Va., where the 
saintly Robert Hunt ministered in the rude, temporary church 
building till his death, and this Catholic Church was at Fort S. 
George on the coast of Maine in 1607; where Richard 
Seymour officiated in the first church built by English hands 
on the chill New England shores. It was present — this 
Church of Magna Charta with its benedictory services and 
its priest — at the inauguration of representative government on 
this continent when the Virginia Burgesses, elected by the pop- 
ular vote, met in the choir of the little church at Jamestown and 
legislated for commonwealth and church, after prayers by Par- 
son Bucke. It has been — this liberty-loving Church of Magna 
Charta— with us throughout our country's past, and when we 
study its history we cease to wonder at its presence and its prayers 
in connection with each step in our country's development. The 
very planting of this country is found to be an act of faith — the 
struggle for the supremacy in this Western world of the English 
people and England's Holy Church as opposed to the Latin peo- 
ples and the faith of Rome. 

The very idea of liberty, as we understand it to-day, is the gift 
of the Church of England to the English-speaking peoples. 
It was under the lead of Stephen Langdon, Archbishop of 
Canterbury, that the English barons wrung, despite the power of 
Rome, Magna Charta from a perfidious king ; and Magna Charta, 
be it remembered, was anathematized by the Roman Pontiff, for 
its provisions called for the maintainance, unimpaired, of the lib- 
erties of holy church — the Church of England — the church of 
the English-speaking peoples, we represent to-day. The close 
connection of the church with the development of our liberty, civil 
and religious, our laws, our institutions, our very civilization, is 
a matter of history. Free elective government dates its origin 
to Virginia, and to the meeting of the House of Burgesses, in the 
church at Jamestown in 1619, rather than to the social compact, 
framed a year or more later in the cabin of the Mayflower, or to 
the Puritan theocracy of Massachusetts, where the union and 
identity of church and State were maintained with tyrannous force. 
In the Church of England colony of Virginia the people were the 
source of power; they chose their representatives who legislated 
for the common weal. In Massachusetts, the magistrates and 
ministers were autocratic. To be a freeman, to exercise the fran- 
chise, to claim the protection of the authorities, one must be a 
member of the Puritan Church. Quakers, Baptists, Churchmen 



14 THE COLUMBIAN SERMON. 

were outside the pale of the law. They were taxed for the 
maintenance of a magistracy, in the choice of which they had no 
voice, and for the support of a ministry which accorded to them 
no spiritual services, or kindly oversight, in return. 

It was only in sullen obedience to the King's missive, and on 
the abrogation of a charter, gained and kept by fraud, that the 
grim Puritans of Massachusetts relaxed their bitter persecution, 
even unto death, of the fanatical Quakers, and suffered the sur- 
pliced priest of the Church of England to minister in accordance 
with the forms of the Common Prayer in the Boston town-house. 
The preliminary struggles for independence were fought quite as 
much in the vestries of Virginia and the colonies to the south- 
ward, combating the exercise in America of a foreign rule, as in 
the New England town -meetings. It was but natural that when 
the strife for freedom came. Churchmen should be leaders from the 
start Of the signers of the Declaration of Independence two- 
thirds were, by baptism, by office-bearing, by attendance on her 
services and sacraments, members of the American Colonial 
Church. The J&rst prayer in the Continental Congress was of- 
fered by a patriotic priest of Philadelphia. The first chaplain of 
Congress was the saintly William White, afterwards the first 
Bishop of Pennsylvania. The firBt President of Congress was a 
Churchman. It was the casting vote of a Churchman that de- 
cided the attitude of Pennsylvania toward the Declaration. It 
was the casting vote of another Churchman that carried Delaware 
for freedom at this critical juncture. Of several of the thirteen 
colonies all the "signers" were Churchmen. Of even a larger 
number it is the fact that all were Churchmen but one. It is the 
testimony of the elder Adams that but for three men the coun- 
try's independence would never have been assured. These three 
men were Churchmen. The blood of patriot Churchmen moist- 
ened every battlefield from Bunker Hill to Yorktown. A Church- 
man's hand swung out from the old Christ Church belfry, in Bos- 
ton, the signal lanterns that guided the ride of Paul Revere. 
The hands of Churchmen were busy in the destruction of tea in 
Boston harbor, in the pulling down of the statue of George III., 
on the Bowling Green, New York, and in the burning of the Roy- 
al Arms, in Philadelphia, when Independence had been declared. 
A Churchman first read in public, in the State House Square of 
Philadelphia, the Declaration of Independence, written by a Vir- 
ginia vestryman — its adoption moved by another Churchman — 
reported by a Churchman as chairman of the committee to which 



I 



THE COLUMBIAN SEBMON. 



15 



the draft was referred — adopted through Churchmen's votes— 
and signed by thirty-five Churchmen's hands; while of other 
faiths there were but twelve Congregationalists, four Presbyteri- 
ans, three Quakers, and later, in August, one Romanist, Charles 
Carroll, of Carrollton, who was for the greater part of his life a 
pew-holder at Saint Ann's, Annapolis, one of the historic parishes 
of the American Church. Although a number of the clergy, not- 
ably those of foreign birth, were faithful to their vows of allegi- 
ance to the Motherland, still the major part of the whole body 
was in sympathy with the patriotic cause, and fully two score 
took a personal part in the measures of the patriots, either as 
members and chairmen of the committees of safety and corre- 
spondence, as chaplains, or as actual combatants. It was John 
Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg, a Virginia priest of the Church, who 
threw off hie ministerial garb to lead his people to the field of 
battle. It was Charles Mynn Thruston, another Virginia priest, 
who took to the field and became known in the revolutionary an- 
nals as the "Fighting Parson of the Shenandoah." Provoost, of 
New York ; Croes, of New Jersey, and Eobert Smith, of South 
Carolina, afterwards the first bishops of their respective States, 
bore arms in the strife. Six of the signers of the Declaration of 
Independence were sons or grandsons of priests of the Church. 
No religious body in the laud can present so full, so complete, so 
notables record for patriotism in the struggle which won for us 
our civil and religious liberty as the Church we represent to-day. 
The charge of "toryism," grounded on the fact that a portion 
of the clergy and certain of the laity clung to the royal cause, is 
offset by the facts to which we have alluded. With far greater 
truth could this charge be urged against the Congregationalists, 
of whom scores, hundreds, even thousands— among them min- 
isters, magistrates, lawyers, and the leading men, socially, politic- 
ally, financially, of the New England Provinces, adhered to the 
crown. Puritan Harvard furnished three score names from its 
list of graduates to a single bill of attainder. The Presbyterians 
of the middle and southern States were largely royalists, contrib- 
uting officers, chaplains, and soldiers to the tory regiments of the 
Carolinas, and at the close of the strife emigrating to the Provin- 
ces by thousands. The numerical supremacy of the Presbyteri- 
ans in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, to-day, is due to the 
preponderance of Presbyterian refugees fleeing from the Inde- 
pendent States when the war was over. The Quakers were, with 
a few noteworthy exceptions, on the British side. The Metho- 



16 THE COLUMBIAN SERMON. 

dists, followiDg the behests of John Wesley, whose "■Taxaiion no 
Tyraimy'" won for him the thanks and pay of the British minis- 
try, were noticeably in sympathy with the motherland. Francis 
Asbury and Captain Thomas Webb, their acknowledged leaders, 
were confined during much of the war as tory "suspects," in 
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The Eomanists were, almost to a 
man, "tories;" and the patriotism of the Carrolls and a few others 
like-minded, worthy as it is of record and remembrance, cannot 
condone the enlistment and service of a professedly Irish Roman 
Catholic regiment, in Philadelphia during the British occupation 
of that city, and the absolute refusal of the French Romanists of 
Canada, bishop, priests, and people, to make common cause with 
the Americans in throwing off the British yoke. With these 
facts patent to every student of American history, it is whimsical 
to note the passive acquiescence of Chui-chmen in the arrogant 
and unhistorical assumptions of the popular histories of an un- 
critical period, which ascribe to the Puritans a tolerance and a 
love of liberty they never displayed, and in their laudations of 
New England as the source of our freedom, have overlooked the 
greater claims of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York, which 
writers of our own day are just bringing to light. 

The connection of the Church of England with our discovery, 
our colonization, our development, our independence, supplies the 
key to our history as a people. It reveals to us the struggle for 
the settlement, the mastership, the acquisition of the Continent 
of North America, extending through the four centuries, dating 
from Columbus and Cabot, between the Latin peoples and the 
Roman faith and the English nation and church. Read in this 
light and with the study of documents, found in the State paper 
office of London, and among the royal archives at Simancas, in 
Spain, the modern student of our history, under the capable guid- 
ance of such investigators as Prof. Alexander Brown, in his re- 
cent Genesis of the Uniied Sfnies. and like philosophic treatises 
accompanied by documentary evidence not to be gainsaid, our his- 
tory is being reconstructed and the Church's share in it all con- 
fessed. In view of this contention of rival races and opposing 
faiths for the possession — for the supremacy — for the very terri- 
tory of the North American Continent, the story of each little 
colony on the Atlantic coast, dating back to the last years of the 
sixteenth century and the very beginning of the seventeenth, all 
ante-dating the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock, be- 
comes invested with an interest and an importance difficult to ex- 



THE COLUMBIAN SERMON. 17 

aggerate. The conflicts with the Indians and their French and 
Spanish allies at the South — along the Alleganies and on the 
northern frontiers of New York and New England — are each and 
all events in a holy war; and the issue of this long-continued 
strife as spread upon the page of history and, in fact, as patent 
to every observing eye, prefigures our final destiny and presages 
the "conquering and to conquer" of the American Catholic 
Church in the days to come. 

The results of this struggle of the centuries for the possession 
and supremacy of the North American Continent, between the 
Latin peoples and the Eoman faith and the English race and 
church, are evident to all men. In spite of Alexander's bulls, 
Spain cannot claim to-day a foot of the North American Conti- 
nent. Even the land fall of Columbus, the San Salvador, which 
he first discovered and where he raised the standard of Castile 
and Leon, has passed into English hands. 

From our most eastern point to the southern extremity of 
Florida; from the Gulf of Mexico at the south to the inland seas 
of our northern border; all along the Pacific Coast; wherever, in 
fact, the "stars and stripes" of the flag of the great Republic 
floats over the territory which is ours by conquest, by purchase, 
or by possession, we are not Spanish, not French, not Latin, but 
instead we are an English-speaking people; and our institutions, 
our civil and religious freedom, our ideas of liberty and law, are 
those of our English ancestry and not those of the Latin race. 
Even those portions of our land where, in other days, the Spanish 
or the French monarchs held sway have in their absorption in our 
common nationality become like the rest of our country imbued 
with the English civilization, the English ideas of liberty and 
law, the English faith. Spain and France have contributed prac- 
tically nothing to our civilization, nothing to the making of the 
Eepublic. The claims of the Church of Rome to a share in the 
molding of the nation and the fashioning of our free institutions 
rest on no historical foundation whatever. Whatever the Latin 
peoples or the Church of Rome may have accomplished in the 
past of our country's history has long since faded out of sight in 
the overmasteiing power and the abiding presence in this land of 
the English settler, soldier, statesman, and churchman. Again 
do I assert, and the verdict of history will bear out the assertion, 
that we, the people of the United States, owe nothing of our pres- 
ent greatness and glory to Columbus, nothing to Spain, nothing 
to Rome. Our fathers and their fathers before them recognized 



18 THE COLUMBIAN SEKMON. 

the fact that this land of ours was to be redeemed by blood, by 
infinite pains, by the lavish expenditure of treasures from the 
machinations of the French Jesuits of New France, — whose abr 
solution of their Indian converts, Parkman tells us, was condi- 
tioned on the savages' professions of hatred of the English here- 
tics and colonists, — and from the Spanish fanatics and inqusitors 
of the west and south, who allowed no religious liberties whatever. 

If the claims of the Romanists to the making and shaping the 
Republic are historically true why is not the inquisition still main- 
tained as it was set up a century and a half ago in the Spanish 
territory, west of the Mississippi, now a part of the State of Iowa ? 
And why were ministrations of any others than priests of the 
Roman obedience forbidden in Florida, in Alabama, in Mississip- 
pi, in Louisiana until in the overthrow of the supremacy of the 
Latin race, when the South and South-west were acquired by ces- 
sion and purchase, religious liberty, unknown before, was gained ? 

The church of a people speaking the English language and 
built up by Englishmen on the race ideas of liberty, progress, 
right and law, found in the English Magna Charta, the English 
Bill of Rights, the English Constitution, the English Common 
Law, the English Bible, the English Book of Common Prayer, 
must be like the mother Church of England, an independent, a 
National, an American Catholic Church. Offspring of the Na- 
tional Church of England, she is no "mission," dependent on 
Propaganda or Pope,, but is herself national, independent, owning 
no supreme head but Christ, possessing in her completeness and 
continuity the historic episcopate — the apostolate, instituted by 
the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. It is "the free church in the 
free State" — the ideal of the great Italian statesman Cavour, that 
we American Catholics possess. For the men who framed the 
Federal Constitution, and organized, and set on foot, the machin- 
ery of our republican form of government, as well as those who 
declared our civil freedom and won on the field of battle our in- 
dependence, were largely the men who organized in close accor- 
dance with the principles of our civil system this independent 
American Church. Our autonomy was gained in the birth-throes 
of the Nation. In the preface to our Book of Common Prayer 
we emphasize the fact, true of no other religious body in the land, 
that in the winning of our National independence, our ecclesias- 
tical freedom was assured. The American Catholic Church, his- 
torically the church of the country from the date of Cabot's prac- 
tical "protest" against the bull of Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexan- 



THE COLUMBIAN SERMON. 19 

der VI., in 1497, became the Church of the Nation, as it made 
its structural organization conformable in the minutest particulars 
to the form of government adopted by the people, and made itself 
like the State, free from allegiance to foreign potentate or power. 

We cannot reverse the decisions of the centuries. We cannot 
put aside or ignore the teachings of our country's past history. 
If we listen to the assumptions of a false Catholicism, we do de- 
spite to our fathers, who gave us constitutional liberty and relig- 
ious freedom. We owe neither of these inestimable privileges 
to the Latin race or the Church of Rome. They are our price- 
less heritage from our English sires and from England's Church. 
We may not wisely sell our birthright for a mess of pottage. 
The visitor at Chicago's Columbian Exposition may see if he 
will, the bulls of demarkation and exclusion which professed to 
give the new world to Spain to hold as an appanage of Eome. 
Let the sight of these parchments, signed by the sinstained hand 
of a Rodrigo Borgia — a selfish sensualist who claimed to sit in 
S. Peter's seat and be the vicar of the sinless Christ — and sealed 
with the fisherman's ring, worn so unworthily by one who had 
practically bought the popedom, excite every American's heart 
to grateful praise to the Church's Head, the Son of God, that we, 
freemen in Christ, freeman whom the truth makes free, members 
of the American Catholic Church, independent of alien potentate 
or power, knowing no king but Jesus, owning no allegiance save 
to Him who is God over all, blessed forever, owe neither our ec- 
clesiastical or our civil freedom, our institutions, our liberty, our 
laws, our civilization, our discovery, our founding, our history, or 
anything of moment that we have or that gives us standing among 
the peoples of the earth, to Columhus, nothing to Spain, nothing to 
Home. We have, as a nation and we o£fer to the world, the high- 
est type, the fullest realization of freedom, — a constitutional lib- 
erty protected by law. We have, and we offer to the nation and 
the world, the truest religious liberty, — the highe8t;-the free, the 
independent Church in the free and independent State, the Ameri- 
can branch of the Catholic Church of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

The promise is: "For all the land which thou seest, to thee 
will I give it, and to thy seed forever." That promise of old 
given to the father of the faithful is renewed to us and to our 
children. Let us arise and in the name of God possess this 
beautiful land! 



Appe:ndix. 



The claim, repeatedly made by superficial Romish students of 
modern history and reiterated of late by no less an authority than 
Cardinal Gibbons, that "to the" (Roman) "Catholic Church 
must of necessity be attributed all that was done in the new 
world since, Columbus until the rise of the Reformation,"* places 
the blame for the atrocities of the Spanish settlements and con- 
quests just where it belongs, not indeed on Catholicism, but on 
Romanism alone. 

The quickening of the peoples of Europe to a higher 
intellectual life; the aspirations of all classes and conditions 
of men for a return to the primitive faith and order in ec- 
clesiastical affairs; the revival of learning; the manifestation of 
the spirit of discovery, largely due to Prince Henry of Portugal, 
in whose veins coursed the blood of his noble English grandsire, 
John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster; the upheavings of dynasties; 
the strifes of popes with anti-popes; the "Babylonish captivity" 
resultant from a depraved papalism; the arraignment of the pon- 
tiffs themselves by priests such as Savonarola, sent to the stake 
by Pope Alexander VI., whose shameless sins the preacher had 
not spared, and by poets sueh as Dante, whose Inferno in its 
lowest depths held popes whose lives had been so base that all 
the prayers of all the saints could not lift their grovelling, sin- 
steeped souls even into Purgatory — these were features of the 
age of Columbus. 

To one who recognizes the fact that coincidences are not ne- 
cessarily consequences — to one who would learn the philosophy 
of history and trace to ultimate causes the mighty movements of 
men in civil and ecclesiastical affairs alike, there will come the 
clear, strong conviction of the truth that each hopeful and help- 
ful movement of this epoch, even the voyages over the Sea of 
Darkness of Columbus and the Cabots, in so far as they were in- 
spired by or undertaken for the public weal, were the result, not 
of the corrupt Christianity of the time, but were the birth-throes 
of that mighty movement which emancipated man from the civil, 

*Gibbpn8'8 Claims of the Catholic Church to the Making of the Republic. 



APPENDIX. 21 

ecclesiastical, and intellectual slavery of the age, and ^ave to the 
world the freedom wherewith Christ hath made us free. "Where 
in the history of nations," says Humboldt, "can one find an epoch 
so fraught with such important results as the discovery of Amer- 
ica, the passage to the East Indies round the Cape of Good Hope, 
and Magellan's first circumnavigation, simultaneously occurring 
with the highest perfection of art, the attainment of intellectual 
and religious freedom, with the sudden enlargement of the knowl- 
edge of the earth and the heavens."* 

To ascribe these marvels of an age of marvel to the papalism 
which found its fitting representative in Rodrigo Borgia as the 
vicar of Christ, is as untrue to humanity as to history. 



"As Columbus in August, 1498, ran into the mouth of the 
Orinoco, he little thought that before him lay, silent but irrefut- 
able, the proof of the futility of his long-cherished hopes. His 
gratification at the completeness of his success, in that God had 
permitted the accomplishment of all his predictions, to the con- 
fusion of those who had opposed and derided him, never left him ; 
even in the fever which overtook him on the last voyage, his 
strong faith cried to him : ' Why dost thou falter in thy trust to 
God? He gave thee India!' In this belief he died. The con- 
viction that Hayti was Cipangu, that Cuba was Cathay, did not 
long outlive its author; the discovery of the Pacific soon made it 
clear that a new world and another sea lay between the landfall 
of Columbus and the goal of his endeavors." f 



Governor Dinwiddie, in urging the Assembly of Virginia, in 
1756, to active war measures against the French and Indians, 
warned them of the alternative of "giving up your Liberty for 
Slavery, the purest Religion for the grossest Idolatry and Super- 
stition, the legal and mild Government of a Protestant King for 
the Arbitrary Exactions and heavy Oppressions of a Popish 
Tyrant." J 

"It was no part or purpose of their work of Christianizing sav- 



* Cosmos, Eng. Ed., II., 673. 

t W. H. Tillinghast, in Narrative and Critical History of America, I., 1. 

X Dinunddie Papers, II., p. 515. Quoted in Narrative and Critical History, 
I., 307, foot-note. 



22 APPENDIX. 

ages to impair their qualities as warriors, to dull their knives or 
tomahawks, to quench their thirst for blood, or to restrain the 
fiercest atrocities and barbarities of the fight or the victory." § 



The researches of modern days have enabled us to estimate 
judicially and with historic truth just what Columbus was and 
what he did. He never claimed to have discovered a new world, 
and when we credit him with this result of his sighting San Sal- 
vador when in quest of Cathay, Cipango, and the land of Ind, we 
simply project our later, fuller knowledge, the result of subse- 
quent discoveries unknown to Columbus, into his mind. Prof. 
Fiske, who accords to Columbus qualities of mind and genius 
other and equally well-informed investigators deny, acknowledges 
(I., 390) that "Columbus never professed to have discovered 
America; he died in the belief that what he had don© was to 
reach the eastern shores of Asia by a shorter route than the 
Portuguese." (See Discovery of America, I., 448.) 



§George E. Ellis, D.D., LL.D., Pies. Mass. Hist. Soc, in Narrative and 
Critical History, I., p. 307. 



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